The symptoms are what they were when I first blogged the problem on June 21, and again when I posted a follow-up on June 24. That was when the Cox service guy tightened everything up and all seemed well … until he left. When I called to report the problem not solved Cox said they would send a “senior technician” on Friday. A guy came today. The problems were exactly as we see above. He said he would have to come back with a “senior technician” (or whatever they call them — I might be a bit off on the title), which this dude clearly wasn’t. He wanted the two of them to come a week from next Wednesday. We’re gone next week anyway, but I got him to commit to a week from Monday. That’s July 6, in the morning. The problem has been with us at least since the 18th, when I arrived here from Boston.

This evening we got a call from a Cox survey robot, following up on the failed service visit this afternoon. My wife took the call. After she indicated our dissatisfaction with the visit (by pressing the appropriate numbers in answer to a series of questions), the robot said we should hold to talk to a human. Then it wanted our ten-digit Cox account number. My wife didn’t know it, so the robot said the call couldn’t be completed. And that was that.

I doubt another visit from anybody will solve the problem, because I don’t think the problem is here. I think it’s in Cox’s system. I think that’s what the traceroute shows.

But I don’t know.

I do know that this is inexcusably bad customer service.

For Cox, in case they’re reading this…

I am connected directly to the cable modem. No routers, firewalls or other things between my laptop and the modem.

I have rebooted the modem about a hundred times. I have re-started my computers. In fact I have tested the link with three different laptops. Same results. Re-booting sometimes helps, sometimes not.

Please quit trying to fix this only at my end of the network. The network includes far more than me and my cable modem.

Please make it easier to reach technically knowledgeable human beings.

Make your chat system useful. At one point the chat person gave me Linksys’ number to call.

Hunter, I’ve been paying for years to get Cox’s top grade of service. This is now what they call “premier.” The price is $64.95/month. It would be much less if I also used Cox for cable TV and/or phone. The last I checked, a year or more ago, “premier” bought me 10/1 Mbp/s.

I noticed the last time I was here (which I am only every few months, since I now work in Boston and rent an apartment there) that the speeds had gone up considerably, though not to the ~18/4 I’m getting now at the top end. According to a call a few days ago to Netgear, this is because my 2006 vintage Netgear router/vpn/firewall couldn’t handle Cox’s downstream speeds. That device is now out of the picture and I have a direct connection. Of course, the rest of the house is now out of the picture and has no connection. Things will stay out until I get a new 8-port router/switch. (Recommendations welcome.) And I won’t do that until Cox fixes the failure problem.

In your case I suspect you’re on an old plan that never got upgraded.

Cox’s plans and price breaks are here. To see what they’ll do at your address, go here.

Cox does offer “business” service levels. As is the custom with all cable and phone companies, the price is a multiple of the residential deals, for slower data rates. The best you can do for business is 15/3Mbp/s for $315. That also gets you one static IP address. More are available at additional cost.

Supposedly service is better. From about 2002-2005 I had a business as well as a residential account, because I wanted static IP addresses and good service. Residential then delivered 3/.35 Mbps while Business delivered 1/.35Mbps. The former was about $35/month, as I recall; and the latter was over $100/month. The service, however, was minimal with both. In fact I got somewhat better action out of the residential account than the business one. So I dropped the business account and stuck with residential.

Meanwhile, all this makes me appreciate my Verizon FiOS service in Boston. For less than I’m paying Cox, I get a solid 20/20Mbps, and a faster route to a human being at their call center, on the rare occasion when I need service.

Anyway, if I were you I’d give Cox a call. Or, better yet, visit their local offices by Gelson’s at Las Positas and State. Because on the phone you’ll be dealing with robots. Although I suppose calling Sales might get you to a human faster. I haven’t tried. Good luck.

I was having slowness issues as well with COX. I ended up buying a new modem and all is well. I ran the cox test I had mix result high then low. up soild 3.13Mbs Down stream had 17MBs noe getting 11MB’s. I have been thinking about switching to DSL

1) You say you have rebooted your cable modem a number of times. Just to be clear, have you power-cycled the cable modem, or pressed a reset button? Sometimes a Power cycle will solve things that a reset doesn’t.

2) Have you unplugged your cable modem from power and let it sit disconnected for more than 15 minutes? At some locations, I have seen this help. I am not sure why, other than it might be long enough for the upstream gear to “forget” about you and reconnect in a different way when you show up on the network again.

3) Has the tech replaced the cable modem? I had weird performance issues after a local Comcast network upgrade, and it turned out my four year old cable modem had issues. A newer cable modem fixed the problem.

4) I think Cox is focusing at your cable modem because the big increase in hop times enters at the second hop on your traceroute or ping tests (68.6.40.1). I am not sure if that IP is your cable modem, or the device just beyond your cable modem. If I ping 68.6.40.1 from my location on Comcast in Minnesota, my ping times are reasonable (about 110 ms) with no packet loss). If you browse to http://ipchicken.com/ you can see your public IP address, and determine if you are 68.6.40.1, or an IP beyond that.

5) Do you have any near by neighbors on Cox that you could ask to do a traceroute to see if they also pass through that same device? If you could show Cox that your neighbors pass through it, and also see a delay, that would add more weight to the problem being outside of your house.

Hunter, does Cox still have the Goleta office? I was once at a meeting there where they actually told us that Santa Barbara was the last place the company deployed anything new. Smallest market, farthest away.

FWIW, one of the techs who came to my house (nowhere near the middle of town) told me we were “way out there” and “at the end of the line.” Not sure what to conclude from that.

I have seen similar events occur over the years. It almost always (80/20 rule) ends with, “we had no idea that the change that the guys in XYZ Department made last week could affect us.” Or words to that effect.

It is hard to believe that in 2009, given the success of the internet, that so called “technicians” have no concept of systems (or holistic) thinking. The unstated motto is “local optima to the max!”

I would bet two bits that a new fill_in_the_blank was recently installed. A new router perhaps. Or new routing entries in a table somewhere. A new monitoring agent of some nature. Something.

I have seen techies drop routes (for routers on their internal network) and deny having ever done so… until I produce trace routes showing that fact.

Bottom line, you are probably not going to have any success in the short term. Sorry. But as you only noticed it when you returned, you have no idea when they implemented the change that hosed your connection.

Again, I have called the very next day, and had it take a week to get a “techie” to figure out that some bozo hosed the system. Even when I started the conversation with, “you guys changed something or implemented something at 2:00AM this morning that caused the problem.” (Thank God for cron; but even with a smoking gun, almost no one ever consults common sense!)

Wish I was more hopeful… but until they connect the dots that an internal change caused the situation, they cannot help you.

I had the EXACT same problem with Comcast a few years ago. They show me some BS diagnostic, but everywhere else I go packets are lost and connections time out. I would tell them this and show them where the packets were lost, and where the bottleneck was (their servers) and they would give me a baffled look and tell me they would send some other technician to jiggle my cables in a few weeks.

The problem with my local Comcast was that they had over enrolled and couldn’t actually provide the bandwidth promised to all their customers. This is pretty common with ISP’s that lack local competition.

I’m on the west side and having the same problems. Every evening the cable modem starts dropping the connection every ten or fifteen minutes. Rebooting the cable modem brings the connection back up temporarily only to drop it again in a few minutes. Seems to come in waves. Last week it was fine. This week it’s been hell. My neighbor is having the same problem.

The funny thing is that I am able to release and renew my IP address from Cox, so I know the cable modem is connected and talking to Cox’s DHCP servers. It’s just not getting beyond that point.

I know better than to try and call tech support, so I tried chat. We got as far as “you are going to have to connect your computer directly to the modem before we can troubleshoot” when I repeated for the third time that it wasn’t an issue on my end.

So i’ve sent in an email from the support page of their web site. Hopefully it will find it’s way into the deeper dungeons of tech support where someone might actually know something about what is going on with their routing (which I assume to be the problem).

I’ll let you know if I find anything. And please let us know if you do as well.

I’ve been running into the same difficulties with Cox service and found this helpful blog, so thanks to everyone – now I can answer all my family’s complaints with “it’s not a problem with our equipment, it’s Cox…”.

I do have a question about one of the results of the Cox diagnostic tool. Both Doc Searls and I get this line about a local limitation of 10 Mbps Ethernet subnet. I am connected via ethernet cable to a 54 Mbps wireless / 100 Mbps ethernet router. Well, my PC says it’s on a 100 Mbps ethernet connection, and the advertised specs on the Cox cable/telephone/modem say it’s 10/100, so where is the hold-up? It must be that the Cox box is not supplying more than 10 Mbps ethernet. Am I missing something?

Doc,
We are using Cox at both our office and home, and I would like to be able to use the outbound mail from home, but everytime I go home I have to change it to: smtp.central.cox.net instead of our company account and Cox says there is nothing they can do about it. Is this normal???